openSUSE Leap 16.1 lets users choose between a conventional Linux installation and an immutable system from the same installer, bringing the previously separate Leap Micro into the fold.

It's the first point release after Leap 16.0, which we looked at last year when it reached the release candidate stage.

Leap 16.1 has arrived ahead of its paid enterprise sibling, SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 16.1, which is expected later this month. Its release notes are already available, and IBM discussed the release in September.

The big change in the 16.1 release cycle of both the free and commercial products is that SUSE is merging its conventional Linux with its immutable version, a change the company announced back in February.

SUSE previously offered a commercial stripped-down immutable OS, aimed mainly at hosting containers, called SLE Micro. To correspond with that, there was a free community OS called Leap Micro – the final release was Leap Micro 6.2.

Leap Micro is being discontinued as a separate community distribution.  The Leap 16.1 announcement says: "Immutable Mode with transactionally updating a system with a read-only root filesystem is a big change for this release. Users who know Leap Micro will recognize it right away, because it is the same approach, now integrated directly into Leap. Leap 16.1 in Immutable Mode replaces Leap Micro, and there will be no Leap Micro 6.3 or 7.0. Users simply boot the regular Leap 16.1 install image and select Immutable Mode in Agama."

Both Red Hat and Canonical offer immutable distros, but both use different architectures from their conventional package-based distros. Ubuntu Core is built entirely from snap packages, while Red Hat's "Atomic" immutable distros are built from bootable containers, running on top of OStree, which works a little like a local Git server. Immutable distros built on Arch, such as SteamOS 3 or KDE Linux, resemble ChromeOS at filesystem level, with dual root filesystems that update one another.

Leap belongs to the openSUSE family of distros, backed by enterprise Linux vendor SUSE. Its commercial sibling is SUSE Linux Enterprise Server (SLES). Leap is the free, community-supported version, and they are based on the same core packages and release schedule. openSUSE also has a rolling-release version, called Tumbleweed.

To rephrase this in terms of slightly more familiar Red Hat equivalents, SLES is SUSE's equivalent of RHEL. Leap is the free openSUSE equivalent of the late lamented CentOS Linux. Leap shares a common core with SUSE's enterprise products while offering a broader community package selection. SLES and openSUSE began sharing enterprise binaries in 2021. Red Hat, meanwhile, announced the end of CentOS Linux in 2020, shifting its focus to CentOS Stream.

To continue the Red Hat comparisons, openSUSE Tumbleweed is loosely equivalent to Fedora Rawhide, but with automated testing and rollback of problematic updates. Unlike the best-known rolling distro, the entirely community-built Arch Linux, Tumbleweed uses SUSE's Snapper technology to offer snapshots. If an update breaks something, Tumbleweed users can boot into a snapshot of an older version of the OS, before the offending update was installed, and keep on working. If dozens of updated packages a day prove too much, then openSUSE also offers an experimental slower-moving rolling release called Slowroll.

Despite the modest version-number bump, Leap 16.1 is a substantial annual update. Its release cycle sits between Fedora and interim Ubuntu releases on one side, and Debian and Ubuntu LTS on the other. Along with its other updates, it brings GNOME 48.8, KDE Plasma 6.6.4, and LXQt 2.4.

We tried its Xfce desktop, which surprisingly defaulted to X.org rather than the Wayland-based setup using that we saw in 16.0 last year.

Immutable distros look to be the future of Linux for non-technical users. Android is an immutable OS based on the Linux kernel, and sells in the billions – which is why, as we reported last year, Google is replacing ChromeOS with Android. The result is the AI-festooned GooglebookOS, on sale in Mountain View's new high-end GoogleBook kit.

FOSS desk isn't aware of any other Linux OS in which you're able to choose, at the point of installation, whether you wish it to be immutable or not. For now, in the commercial Linux OS space, only SUSE has anything like this flexibility. It's marketing its immutable versions as being ideal hosts for containers, and as suitable for "edge" devices, meaning that they are expected to be provisioned remotely, update themselves automatically, and recover from faults on their own.

SUSE is a much smaller company than Red Hat, and unfortunately, as we reported earlier this week, it is getting smaller.

This vulture is both a former SUSE Linux user and a former SUSE employee, and we hope it and its unique distribution survive and thrive. ®